from Memory Rewritten

Meditations


The question goes round and round
and creates a dark thought, an idea
that doesn’t convince itself of its whiteness.

What, why, who, when, how, where,
fruits that hang from the tree of desire,
fallen flowers or seeds suspended in the air.

Later, the wind carries them away,
pollen fertilizes other questions
in barren land.

And nobody answers.






I return again and again to the same tree
under the new fruits, the high flowers,
the rhizomes and roots in sight,
the fallen branches.

All of them, thoughts from the same meadow
where ideas graze in solitude and grow
until they release their buds, infertile eggs.

I weed the ground day after day a task
at the whim of the weak grazing
of tangled ideas without harvest.

And I am left with a humble bouquet of flowers
bejeweling my head.





If you think about love and the order of things
like Delmira
if the first source is the last boundary
and the final drop has already flowed at the beginning,

back toward the radiance and the mute roar,
forward toward the dim light and the echo,
today: amazement, chance,
the waning moon
and the standing flower broken. Like Delmira.

So, what door of what house encloses me,
what wind from what street frees me,
on what white of what page do you write to me?




Unfinished Acts

While sleeping, I say a long prayer while I whirl in my dervish dance and fly; while awake, I am mute and pinned to the ground.
While sleeping, I encounter truth; while awake, I doubt.

I go driving in the rain; the windshield wipers dry the tears of that glass.
But all the water in my eyes is still there.

Today the Popocatépetl Volcano is spewing out smoke and embers.
It’s also catching fire inside of me, because I’m still seated on a strangely
leaning chair, and my jade earrings keep swinging as the volcano
of Montevideo’s Cerro roars. 
And I straighten my back royally.

(They say the Atacama Desert has filled with purple flowers
but I am here with my scythe in this sterile wasteland
where I destroy my tree’s tiny buds.)

I love the round, the gorgeous allure
of Parmenides’ silver-plated sphere.
But not this colorful sphere with its cilia,
with its crown of tin and pins
that stalks every day in the window.




Departures


There’s a circle of fire about to be run through
like a ship shot through space
and you will be stronger than in the forceps of childbirth
 
My thought will go far away
And I’ll be there without you knowing

and I’ll be here
little by little, sporadically
following the line from the brooding hive

Now the farewell comes like a rip
and the shreds go with you into the air
and they always will

While you keep looking to the sky
though you can’t see the Southern Cross
there will be a point when my light refracts toward you

and I’ll be there like an indelible mark on your map
drawing itself
between water and blood.





There’s a sighting not of birds
but of a distant child
it’s a divination of their flight
a root in air, a wind from the south
that makes the mother tongue fly
and leaves it lost at a brown river’s edge
that the canals’ water won’t reach.

I hope to come and see its flowers and dawn colors.
To remind him that I am the stem.
And the trunk of his tree.
And his deciduous leaves.

Five hours earlier the sun will rise.
Five hours later he will read my last poem.